Inside a ‘first of its kind’ counter-drone laser test in the American desert

Earlier this month, an aircraft was approaching the Albuquerque airport, miles and miles and miles away from where a group of government officials had gotten together to test a secretive military laser in the New Mexico desert.

The high-energy laser was locked on to a simulated threat at White Sands Missile Range during what officials described as a “first of its kind” evaluation, “holding track” on its target when — unclear to testers in the moment — the system suddenly shut down. 

The platform, known as the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser, wasn’t actually firing at the time and couldn’t have reached the Albuquerque-bound aircraft even if it was. But, as it tracked the test target, it also picked up the distant aircraft all the way toward New Mexico’s largest city, triggering an automated safety mechanism that deactivated the system.

While the aircraft had nothing to do with the planned test, its presence ended up being important, helping demonstrate a point the military was trying to show the Federal Aviation Administration about the laser’s safety, according to an official with the Pentagon’s counter-drone task force.

The aircraft “happened to just be in a very, very, very small one degree angle that the laser was holding track on the threat, and the system shut off,” said Col. Scott McLellan, who recounted the story. McLellan is deputy director for Joint Interagency Task Force 401, a Defense Department entity charged with coordinating counter-drone applications across the federal government.

Once testers identified the cause of the shutdown, it elicited a “tipping point” for the evaluation, he said. To McLellan, it showed the FAA that “the system really does have that kind of inhibit function,” meaning it wouldn’t shoot an aircraft it shouldn’t be shooting at even if it was targeting an enemy drone in the process.  

JIATF 401 and the FAA, along with about half a dozen other agencies, conducted the test between March 7-8, an evaluation fast-tracked by back-to-back incidents involving counter-drone lasers last month that temporarily shut down Texas airspace. 

In mid-February, U.S. Customs and Border Protection used a laser on-loan from the Pentagon to shoot down an object near El Paso, later reported to be Mylar balloons. A few weeks later, troops zapped a CBP-operated drone near Fort Hancock, launched without notifying the military task force assigned to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Texas incidents drew swift, bipartisan congressional criticism, and brought to the fore interagency conflict over competing efforts in the stateside counter-drone space. 

For the military, that means being able to shoot down unmanned aerial systems coming over the southern border that Department of Homeland Security officials (which CBP falls under) have said belong to Mexican cartels and number in the hundreds per day. For the FAA, it means keeping the skies safe for civilian aircraft in the process. 

“Everyone wants to see hostile drones that are a threat incapacitated, but obviously we want to do so in a way that doesn’t pose a threat to civilian aircraft, and it ought to be possible to do both at the same time,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, told reporters earlier this month. “It’s clear that in the early implementation of this technology, coordination fell far below what should have happened.”

For JIATF 401, those authority conflicts seem to be trending toward the better.

“I think they’re much less at odds,” McLellan, who has been in military air defense for decades, said of those agency efforts following the White Sands test. “We’re setting the benchmark for how we do these things going forward to address the threat.”

While the test document results were not released, and it was unclear whether it evaluated every part of the vast, complex web of technology that makes an airplane function, a JIATF 401 spokesperson said that it met the objectives the FAA requested. 

“We got to go together, we got to figure it out and we got to address safety,” McLellan said. “I think that was, in my opinion, again, kind of proven that airspace is going to be safe with this.” 

How the FAA and CBP directly felt about the test remains unclear for this story. A spokesperson for CBP acknowledged DefenseScoop’s questions about the test Friday, but did not respond by press time. The FAA did not respond to multiple emails and calls starting Thursday.

Following a closed-door hearing from administration officials earlier this month about the dual Texas shootdowns, lawmakers urged the agencies involved in the counter-drone environment to quickly fix coordination issues. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., ranking member of the Commerce Committee, sent a scathing letter to top agency officials Wednesday over “serious process failures that expose the flying public to unacceptable safety risks.” 

To that concern, the White Sands test’s most important aspect was to demonstrate the laser’s features, “specifically to address FAA” worries about safety, according to the Pentagon, and gather data about the system’s effect on aircraft surrogates and test the platform’s automated shut-off system.

McLellan said the evaluation involved “localized” firing of the AMP-HEL from various distances at the fuselage of a Boeing 767 airliner that testers lugged on to White Sands to assess the system’s damaging effects, “or lack thereof” on aircraft material. He said it aimed to “disprove some myths” about the capability, noting “that energy clearly dissipates over time and space and doesn’t have the effect everyone thinks it does as far as lasers are concerned.” 

A JIATF 401 spokesperson said the laser was fired at its “maximum effective range for up to 8 seconds” at the grounded fuselage, “demonstrating that even at full intensity, the laser caused no structural damage to the aircraft.”

The CEO of AeroVironment, Wahid Nawabi, which builds the LOCUST counter-drone laser system that Reuters reported was used in the El Paso incident, referenced the Texas incidents and FAA testing in an interview with 60 Minutes Sunday, partially to address that worry.

“There was some concerns that these systems can interfere and hurt commercial airplanes, which is not true,” he said in response to a question about the incidents. “The FAA, just this past weekend, conducted a series of tests to ensure and demonstrate that the type of system that we’ve developed cannot and will not defeat or harm a commercial airliner.”

When asked if the laser could disable and crash a commercial airplane, he said “the system is designed to not make mistakes like that.” 

At White Sands, on the second day of the test, officials flew multiple aircraft behind simulated enemy targets to demonstrate the laser’s shutdown feature when it detects an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, a signal transmitted by commercial planes, even when it is tracking a suspected adversarial drone.

“I liken it to the fact that it actually doesn’t ever really want to fire, you almost have to force it to fire, and there has to be multiple things that line up to allow the system to fire,” McLellan said. “And what we did demonstrate was with the use of multiple different types of aircraft, to include a threat aircraft and friendly aircraft and unknown aircraft, the system will inhibit and prevent the operator from firing on multiple different scenarios in multiple different ranges.” 

Of those lines of effort — to show how the system interacts with aircraft and its safety features — the test, McLellan said, “absolutely met the two objectives that the FAA asked us to look at.”

‘Lasers aren’t the panacea’

High-energy lasers and their use on the southern border are only part of combating what has been dubbed in some circles as “the drone problem” in the homeland. 

Molly Campbell, a drone and counter-drone researcher with the Center for a New American Security, said that while the federal government is focusing on the cartel drones over the U.S.-Mexico border, officials are considering UAS threats beyond that environment and looking at “a bit longer term, bigger picture.”

Given its use during the Russia-Ukraine war, where UAS have caused havoc deep in opposing territory, as well as numerous drone sightings over military bases over the last few years, the technology heightens the concern of attack well into the American interior, especially amid the ongoing war with Iran.

“The ability to weaponize drones, now available on the internet from military operators from the Ukrainian and Russian war, is both impressive and terrifying.” Campbell said. “It’s [like] The Anarchist Cookbook through Google: you can 3D print these things, you can weaponize these systems in a way that we haven’t really seen before in a heightened threat environment.”

She said “intense” government bureaucracy over the issue has compounded the intrinsic difficulty of combating drones in the homeland, which is different from overseas, making “straightforward execution a lot harder.”

Some stateside complexities aren’t “necessarily considere[d] when you’re out at Al Udeid shooting down Iranian drones,” she said, referring to a base in Qatar. “It’s an inherent complexity of doing these types of missions in the homeland, be it base defense or repelling quadcopters at a football stadium.”

Still, the Iran war has highlighted to the U.S. an urgency for such technology in overseas conflict. Six American service members were killed by an Iranian drone in the outset of the campaign, known as Operation Epic Fury, and were the first U.S. casualties of the war. Tehran has also launched drones at many other targets across the Gulf region.

DefenseScoop recently reported that members of JIATF 401 traveled to Kyiv just before the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran started to better understand how Ukrainians were defending against Russian drones, including one that Tehran has been employing in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Army was sending counter-drone systems used by Ukraine to help defeat Iran’s UAS.

“What I would tell you is that I believe one of the reasons we stood up JIATF 401 to surge against this problem is because we didn’t want to wait for a 9/11 event inside the United States to address the threat of unmanned systems,” Army Brig. Gen. Matt Ross, director of the task force, previously said. Because of conflict in the Middle East, “we have elevated the sense of urgency, and it’s getting a lot of attention in terms of how we maintain the capability and capacity to deal with the threat of these systems.”

These conflicts have also illustrated the cost imbalance of downing inexpensive, mass-produced drones with pricey countermeasures. Lasers, such as the one tested at White Sands, are being billed as cheaper ways to level that disparity.

“A Patriot missile battery costs about a billion dollars to procure one system, each missile costs about $4 million a shot,” said Nawabi, the AV CEO. For the laser, “the cost per shot goes from $4 million a shot, to less than $5 a shot, in most cases, about $3 a shot.”

Experts and officials alike have said that to best defeat drones, the government cannot rely on one system. The AMP-HEL, for example, is meant to “defeat group small UAS with the lowest collateral possible while protecting air travelers,” said a JIATF 401 spokesperson. 

Multiple systems, from lasers to nets to drones themselves, should be “layered,” they’ve said, meaning placed at different distances and used at different times to counter a variety of drones — big and small, far and close, high and low.

“Lasers aren’t the panacea. They’re not going to win this. It involves extensive air domain awareness, radio frequency stuff, radio frequency detection and mitigation. All these systems are new, and all these systems are being applied inside the United States, and they require extensive coordination,” McLellan said. “So moving forward, we got to layer up and we got to defend in depth.”